Unions split over telecoms jobs for sacked steelmen

STEELWORKERS at Corus were invited to consider alternative careers as mobile telephone technicians yesterday as the firm confirmed that 6,000 jobs would go.

On a day of some confusion, the Corus workers were told that up to 4,000 new jobs would be available under a pioneering deal agreed between the AEEU engineering union and EXi Telecoms. A rival union, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, persuaded Corus at a meeting to consider its own alternative to the closure programme.

But Sir Brian Moffat, Corus's chairman, told MPs a few hours later that this did not mean that the company had abandoned its plans to get rid of 6,000 workers. He insisted that, without the redundancies, the long term future of the whole company, and the 22,000 workers keeping their jobs, would be under threat.

The steelworkers facing unemployment, mainly at Llanwern in South Wales and in the North-East, reacted with scepticism to the offer of 4,000 new jobs in the telecoms industry. After the small print of the deal was disclosed at a news conference at the Department of Trade and Industry, the ISTC accused its rival union of raising unrealistic expectations with a "cruel fantasy".

EXi Telecoms, which installs and maintains infrastructure equipment for mobile telephone operators, said up to 4,000 jobs would be created over the next two years and that it would recruit Corus workers to fill the vacancies. In what Sir Ken Jackson, the AEEU's general secretary, described as "a genuinely radical way of dealing with the threat of redundancy", Corus has agreed to release its workers for retraining by EXi Telecoms while they are still being paid.

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Martin Kirke, an EXi Telecoms executive, said electricians and skilled steel industry workers would make good recruits provided that they were "flexible and prepared to retrain and travel". But Mr Kirke was unable to give any detail about how many vacancies, which would also be open to other recruits, would be available on a plant-by-plant basis.

Stephen Byers, the Trade Secretary, welcomed the deal, although he renewed his plea to Corus to reconsider its redundancy programme. But in the Welsh Assembly Michael German, the economic development minister, said: "There is a danger that this announcement raises false hopes and unrealistic expectations in the steel-making communities."